The present invention generally relates to the establishment of a communicative connection between a supplier of goods or services and a potential consumer of such goods or services over the Internet via a Web site or Web sites specially engineered so that conventional Internet search engines consider the Web site(s) to be (a) highly relevant Web site(s).
The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks, which are linked together. The computers and computer networks that comprise the Internet electronically communicate using Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Each computer and computer network has a unique “address” on the Internet, called an Internet Protocol address (IP address). The World Wide Web (a/k/a “www” or “Web”) is a collection of interconnected documents, files, among other things, that are linked together by hyperlinks and URLs. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is one of several application layer protocols that utilizes the Internet to link and provide access to the documents, files, among other things, that are part of the Web. Those documents, files, among other things, are called Web documents. A Web page is a type of Web document. A Web page can consist of files of static text stored within a file system of a Web server. The static text is usually in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format or Extensible HTML (XHTML) format. A Web server is a computer that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from another computer and providing HTTP in response, such as a Web page. A user, via a computer linked to the Internet, can retrieve a Web page from a local computer or from a remote Web server, which “publishes” the Web page on the Web. The user's computer retrieves the Web page from its location via a Web browser, which then depicts the Web page on a connected monitor. One Web page can provide a way of navigation to another Web page via a hypertext link (“link”). The Web browser is a software application, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox that formats HTML information for display. An embedded link is a link that is embedded in an object such as the Web page's text (hyper text). A person can create a Web page using a text editor or a specialized HTML editor, which is a software application such as CSS, XML, JavaScript, and ECMAScript. A Web site is a collection of Web pages and other types of Web documents that are hosted on a particular domain (or sub-domain) within the Web. A domain's name identifies the Web site and appears as a component of a Web site's Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The domain name is a stand in for numeric IP addresses. A specific domain name is obtained through a domain name registrar, such as VeriSign and Go Daddy.
A potential consumer of goods or services who has tried to locate information about suppliers of a particular good or service via the Internet typically has to use a Web search engine, which is an information retrieval system. Examples of such Web search engines are the search engines that the websites http://www.google.com (GOOGLE®) and http://www.yahoo.com (YAHOO®) provide. Unfortunately, such Internet search engines must rely on the search engine's algorithm to determine the Web sites that are the most relevant to the user based on the user's search terms. The search engine then lists (i.e., ranks) those Web sites at the top of the list; the search engine lists less relevant Web sites later. A typical user then selects the Web site of suppliers that are near the top of the list. Consequently, many Web site designers design their Web sites so that a search engine lists the Web site near the top of the list, which increases the number of times a user visit their Web site. Although a particular search engine's algorithm is typically a closely guarded trade secret, most major search engines follow the same general rules.
Generally, although what the algorithm used by a conventional search engine is not known for certain, Applicant believes a particular search engine's algorithm, at least preliminarily, ranks the Web pages that the search engine has located based on the location and frequency of keywords (e.g., the user's search terms) on a Web page. For example, Web pages containing a particular user's search term, in the domain name or in the header/title html tags, are typically more relevant than other Web pages to the topic being searched by the user. Consequently, a Web page having a particular search term in the header tag is often assumed to be more relevant by the search algorithm. Applicant also believes search engines check to see if a user's search term appears near the top of the page. The search engine's algorithm assumes that any Web page relevant to the topic will mention the user's search term in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of the text.
Frequency is another major factor search engines use to determine relevancy of a Web page to a specific user's search term. A search engine will analyze how frequently keywords appear in relation to other words on a Web page. The Web pages where the user's search term appears with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other Web pages.
Some search engines utilize other ingredients to qualify further the typical location and frequency algorithm methods described above. One of the most often used fields that are searched is a Web site's metatags. However, not all search engines read metatags. Metatags are a placeholder for storing information that may or may not be processed by an HTTP server or indexed by a search engine.
The final main feature Applicant believes most search engines use to rank and display the most relevant web pages to the user's search query includes an analysis of how pages link to each other. In this manner, a search engine can better determine what a Web site is about and whether the Web site deserves a higher ranking. Links to other related Web sites outside of a given Web site typically result in a higher ranking. Some search engines also screen out attempts by computer users to build into their Web sites false links, which the Web site designer could include in an attempt to boost their rankings.
Unfortunately, a potential consumer attempting to locate a supplier of particular goods or services using a conventional search engine may be successful in locating Web sites for only a few of the multitude of suppliers of those particular goods or services. Searching using this technique is too laborious, inefficient, and time-consuming for many potential consumers and, especially, for a professional or business person who needs quick access to information about the suppliers' particular goods and services in order to compare the various suppliers and decide which supplier would best fulfill their needs. Oftentimes, a conventional search will reveal only two or three suppliers of particular goods but will not locate the Web sites of many other suppliers of particular goods or services because those many other suppliers' Web sites did not achieve, for whatever reason, a high enough ranking on a particular search engine to be listed near the top of the list of search results.
Consequently, there is a significant need for a Web site that is a directory of suppliers of goods or services, which Web site is engineered so that a search engine can easily locate and list the Web site near the top of the results in response to a user's (i.e., a potential consumer's) search and which contains a higher level of comparative searching than traditional search engines. In addition, there is a significant need for such a Web site directory to include numerous links to a variety of suppliers of particular goods and services while providing the potential consumer easy and quick navigation to and from the Web sites of those suppliers so that the user can find more detailed information about the supplier. There is also a significant need for the directory Web site to provide a means for the user to communicate with a supplier or group of suppliers in order to, among other things, request quotes and/or additional information from those suppliers on the directory Web site.